Here is a widget of the Schmap! California Guide. One of our Flickr Pictures with Creative Commons license was used in the making of this guide. The picture is published. I believe Marlene took the picture for it; however, it was my flickr account so I am getting credit for it. But so you all know she did it I think.

The picture is one of Oscar at the Museum by the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, CA. Look up the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits and we are one of the pictures. Hope you can see it. Or click here and you’ll see the picture used.

[pageview http://www.schmap.com/templates/t011py.html?uid=california&sid=museums&ultranarrow=true&si=SCHMAP-230508270815#mapview=Map&tab=photos&topleft=32.37233595,-123.05421945&bottomright=39.56046305,-116.03271155&c=f6f6f6A72122A62122A62122FFF88FFAF5BBffffffFFF88Fd8d8d8A4A7A6A621226990ffECEBBD0000005C5A4E5C5A4E000000929292F0EFDA "Schmap California Guide" A picture that Marlene took in the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits is included in this edition of the Schmap California Guide.]

Marlene posted a blog post yesterday on her blog. Please check it out. She has just begun writing her own blog and I look forward to reading her posts.

We came home from the hospital with Henry this morning and we’ve tried to get the family settled again with him around. He is so quiet and likes to sleep. He is a happy baby and we love him so much. Oscar and Lily love him. They have been so sweet. Grandma and Grandpa Scoville left today and went back to Delta after his doctor appointment. Grandma Schaefer arrived from Oregon and was very excited to meet the new baby. Grandparents are wonderful. We sure appreciate all the help that they’ve given to us so far with the new addition of Henry. I do feel for anyone who doesn’t have family support during these transitional times. I’m grateful for the love that we feel from our family. We also enjoyed seeing the Muir’s for a little while yesterday when they came to visit my mom and dad yesterday.

Mom is recuperating and healing and hopefully continues to improve each day. I must admit that I don’t envy any woman that gives birth to a child. Marlene is amazing. Also Henry is healthy and happy and fun to be around. I love holding him on my chest and falling asleep to his regular heart beat and breathing.

I know that many have felt that we were jumping the gun, but Marlene has had many days of contractions and we’re still without a baby at home. Arghh. We are excited that Lily and Oscar are still very excited to have the baby come. We’ll continue to keep you posted. We’re now coming on 2 weeks before the due date (we’ve been 2 weeks early with both Oscar and Lily). Maybe he/she just wants to come when on time. Wow! What a newsflash. Both of the kids have been getting a little nervous, probably because we are about the upcoming change and what that will mean to them.

This week has been fun. We’ve been to two BYU Basketball games this week. Mar didn’t come to the first one. Lily yells out “Go BIU” of course meaning “Go BYU.” Oscar wants to wear his BYU cap to bed everynight. He loves it. He also liked Navy blue clothes. He wants to play BYU all the time (football, basketball, soccer). Oscar and Lily said tonight that they too wanted to BYU Cougar fans for the rest of their lives. Oscar also said “I like BYU more than I like the Wisconsin (meaning Green Bay Packers).” Oscar had attached to Brett Farve and the Packers and wanted them to win. We were able to watch two Saturday Playoff games a few weeks back and he loved the colors (yellow and green).

We went to Oregon for the Christmas break and the New Year Holiday celebration. We had a great time. We were able to visit with Grandma and Grandpa Schaefer for a long while. We ate wonderful meals and had a good visit with the Roseburg missionaries from their ward on Christmas. Oscar looks forward to becoming a missionary. He loves the elders.

Some of the highlights from the trip:
1. The kids talk incessantly about their dog, Nikki. She was hit.
2. Holiday lights – we went to see Christmas lights for a Family Home Evening on New Year’s Eve.
3. Spending some wonderful time with Marlene’s parents. Marlene was able to continue in doing family history research and learning about her dad’s youth and recording it on tape.
4. We relaxed and enjoyed ourselves. Oscar and Lily felt at home by the time we left and were running around like they usually do (I don’t know if Marlene’s parents really loved that) but they were able to get a real glimpse of what life is like for Marlene on daily basis. I always gain substantial appreciation for her as she stays home with the kids when we go on vacations or I have time off from school. They are on the go constantly. I wish I could reign in some of their energy and take it as pill or something.
5. Oscar and Lily love their grandparents
6. The pleasant Oregon weather. It didn’t rain too much, but it was also 50 degrees. So nice. Reminded me that Utah is so cold. It was hard to come back.
7. Walking down the lane in front of their house and seeing the horses and petting them.
8. Phil finished up grades and worked on a few papers while there and also catching as many College Bowl Games and Professional Sports as I could without making everyone upset with me.
9. Oscar and Lily loved playing games with Grandma and feeding Nikki dog biscuits and playing with their toys from Santa Claus.

Another huge event was Lily’s 3rd Birthday with Grandma and Grandpa Schaefer. It was great. She loved her cake that looked like a big Strawberry and her icecream. Oscar loved the sorbet.

I’ll have to ask Marlene if she has more.

Marlene and I had a great trip to NYC and Philadelphia for a professional presentation that I gave at the ABCT conference in Philadelphia with some of my colleagues. We presented on “Empirically Supported Marital and Family Therapy Treatments.” We are still finishing the write-up of the material so that we can ship it off to have it reviewed for publication somewhere. However, our goal for that article is to be finished by February. It will actually be two articles when we are finished. Beside the technical aspect relating to that part which was actually a small part of the trip.

We paid for Marlene to come along and we stayed with Lauren and Chris in NYC (Lauren is Marlene’s really good friend from Seventeen Magazine when Marlene interned there just before we got married). We were there for a few days and then we stayed in a hotel for a couple of more days and it was great (Thanks to Marlene’s parents’ timeshare points).

We did alot while there. I love the city. I know Mar does too, but there is something about the sounds of the cars, taxis, etc; the colors of the city, grey, yellow, black; smells, roasted nuts, exhaust, horse manure; and the sights, central park, the many avenues and streets, malls, subway, horses, people. I have to say that I love NYC. It is one of the best places to go. We enjoyed a play (Pygmalion). “My Fair Lady” is based off of this play. It was excellent. It was in the American Airlines Theatre and Claire Danes played the lead character, Eliza Doolittle. She was great. Very entertaining and we got in for something like $29 per ticket. We happened upon some tickets of someone who had purchased a bunch of group tickets and he had extras. Lucky: the show had been sold out and it was during the Broadway strikes so we had already lost our opportunity to see Jennifer Garner and Kevin Kline in Cyrano De Bergerac. We had orchestra seats for that one but because of the strike the theatre was shut down. And they ended the strikes a week later. Bitterly disappointed. Jen Garner is one of Marlene’s favorite actresses (from Alias and 13 Going on 30).

While there we ate a many wonderful cafes and restaurants (both in Philly and in NYC). We enjoyed a wonderful time in NYCs Central Park.

We also went to many great shopping centers and thoroughly enjoyed our time there.

Now to the sad news: We took many, many great pictures. I came home and downloaded them and then the accident happened. It is a long story but I deleted our photos and music file and we haven’t yet been able to recover them. It looks like we’ll have to send it off somewhere to have them recovered professionally, because thus far we haven’t had any luck. We need a mac data recovery software to search the system, but the ones I’ve tested so far haven’t worked. I am so sad. I could cry. It was about 30 GBs of Photos. (I hadn’t backed the last 6 months of them). Also about 45 GBs of music.

So we are photoless of our trip to NYC and Philly right now, hopefully not forever. Thus far I’ve found one service that said they’d only charge us but the estimate was $700 to $1900 to recover the data. This will have to wait until I get a job.

As for the trip, we have much thanks for Marlene’s mom and my parents for watching the kids for the time while we were gone. They switched off and it went well. Thank you!

On to Christmas and the New Year in Oregon.

My sister, Sarah, sent me an email yesterday informing me that Marlene and I have a wedding picture that I posted on Flickr up on a wiki about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You’ll need to scroll down to the section that talks about temples and preparation for marriage and you’ll see us. This was one of the excellent photos taken by our wedding photographer, Jonas Otsuji. His professional website is FeelThePhoto.com. He does wedding throughout the world and his philosophy is based on the idea of letting people enjoy their weddings and then you’ll get the best pictures as opposed to making them stand up and do lots of unnatural poses. We loved him as a photographer. He was recommended to us by some of our friends, Hiedi and Josh Blackwelder.Link to photo itself on the wiki.  And then here is the photo posted to my flickr account. This is a link to the album set of our wedding photos on Flickr. *I apologize for the lack of posts lately — I am trying to recover our pictures and music from my external hard drive that accidently erased, which was the only copy that I had. I’ll post about New York and Philly and Thanksgiving soon. I want to have the pictures to do so.

The last few weeks have been pretty busy and fun at the same time. October and Halloween we lots of fun and I just barely put on the pictures on Flickr that we took.

Marlene went with the kids (neighbors and preschool kids) to Pumpkinland for Preschool one morning and that was a lot of fun. So you’ll see some pictures from that.

Then we all went to Gardner Village to meet the Cahoons (Brandon, Dayna, and Kellen) for a good time just hanging out. Oscar and Lily had a great time playing with Kellen and Brandon.

Next, the Monday night before Halloween we carved pumpkins for FHE and you can see our doings there. Oscar and Lily enjoyed picking out the designs and then helping to pull out all the seeds from the pumpkins. Lily was methodical and just “kept on going.” She’s our little trooper. Oscar had fun but was a bit more lackadaisical about it, but he still did work and had fun. He has learned to say things like “I’m tired. I don’t think I can do that.”

Then for Halloween night we went to the Trunk-or-Treat for the ward and that was fun. We had some pictures taken of us all in our costumes. Oscar was Peter Pan and loved it. Marlene made the costume and I am very proud of her. It looked fantastic. She received many compliments on it. She received help from some of her ward member friends and they were a blessing so she got it done on time. Sewing…I don’t want to try to do more than repair a small hole. Too hard. Or my special froggy bean bags that Grandma Scoville showed me how to make for Christmas one year when I was a youth. That was pretty fun and I made them for everyone in the family. My mom made one for our kids for Christmas one year (it is made out on M&M material. It is a family favorite). Feel free to check out these photos and more on flickr.

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We will have some great pictures from our trip to New York and Philadelphia. I’ve posted the map of the journey from New York to Philadelphia. We fly on a Thursday night “Red-eye” into New York City because that was the best flight. Then we are driving a rental car to Philly for my conference (we are just staying the day in Philly but I hope to see some of the historical sites (e.g., The Constitutional Congress and Liberty Bell) since Marlene has already seen them) and then we are back to NYC. We bought tickets to “Cyrano”, a play with Kevin Kline and Jennifer Garner, but we’ve heard that Broadway is on strike so we probably won’t be seeing that. Sad!!! We’ll have to figure something else out.

Many thanks to our parents who are going to be watching our kids for the 5 days we’re gone. This is the second time we’ve left them for this long and we’re a little nervous. Not that our parents are watching them but that Lily may decide she wants to pull her hair out more. (Any suggestions for trichotilimania – please send them our way). We are doing some behavioral interventions that have been working to help her stop, although it isn’t perfect yet. We are trying have her stop sucking her middle fingers at the same time and she just resists that part, but she hasn’t pulled her hair as much. Which is nice, because her hair is growing in and we can do little pony tails. They are so cute. I must say Lily and Oscar are very excited to see Grandma Schaefer and Grandma and Grandpa Scoville. They will miss Grandpa Schaefer and made him some cards that we’ll be sending soon. Lily said yesterday can you write “Dear Grandpa” for a card that she made. She is adorable.

Here are a few random honorable mentions from flickr.

We’ll post the pictures from back east (NY and Philly) as soon as we get back, which is just before Thanksgiving.We are headed to Delta for Thanksgiving. It will be fun to see all the family and cousins (Oscar and Lily are so excited).

We went to the BYU cougars football game on Saturday and we loved it. Marlene and the kids came and we loved it. We had a nice time on the top row of the stadium, and actually it was great — it provided shade and also a backrest. Here is the BYU Cougars official sports site.  They won 35-16. We left in the 3rd quarter because they were up 28 to 3. The Cougars were making some great plays both on Offense and Defense.  

Marlene wasn’t going to come but then we got such a great parking space next to the stadium that she couldn’t resist so she came and we had a good time. We parked about 5 spaces from the President’s parking stall at the stadium. It was part of a Y lot, but I don’t know if that applies during games – there were no signs or attendants to indicate otherwise. So we went for it and we didn’t get a ticket.